Anjelica Huston, Oscar winning actress & star of The Addams Family, will be signing autographs promoting her new release, “A Story Lately Told,” at the following locations:
11/19/13 7:30 PM
Symphony Space
2537 Broadway,
New York, NY 10025
Phone:(212) 864-5400
11/21/13 Noon
Philadelphia Free Library
1901 Vine St,
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone:(215) 686-5322
11/25/13 7:30
Nourse Theater
275 Hayes St
San Francisco, CA 94102
Phone:(415) 392-4400
Book Description
Writing with an exuberant love of language and detail, Anjelica Huston shares her enchanted childhood in Ireland, her teen years in London, and her coming-of-age as a model and nascent actress in New York.
Living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse, Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which—between movies—her father brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando. Every morning, Anjelica and her brother visited their father while he took his breakfast in bed. “What news?” he’d ask. “I’d seen him the night before,” Anjelica recalls. “There wasn’t much to report.” So she became a storyteller.
In London, where she lives with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separate, Huston encounters the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudies Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she is devastated when her mother dies in a car crash.
Months later she moves to New York, falls in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer Bob Richardson, and becomes a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigates a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies.
A Story Lately Told ends as Huston launches her Hollywood life. The second part of her story—Watch Me—opens in Los Angeles in 1973 and will be published in Fall 2014. Beguiling and beautifully written, Huston’s memoir is a treasure. You can order the book here on Amazon.
About the Author
Anjelica Huston was born on July 8, 1951, to director and actor John Huston and Italian American (from New York) prima ballerina Enrica (Ricki) Soma. Huston spent most of her childhood overseas, in Ireland and England, and in 1969 first dipped her toe into the acting profession, taking a few small roles in her father’s movies. However, in that year her mother died in a car accident, at 39, and Huston relocated to the United States, where the tall, exotically beautiful young woman modeled for several years.
While modeling, Huston had a few more small film roles, but decided to focus more on movies in the early 1980s. She prepared herself by reaching out to acting coach Peggy Feury and began to get roles. The first notable part was in Bob Rafelson’s remake of the classic noir movie The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) (in which Jack Nicholson, with whom Huston was living at the time, was the star). After a few more years of on-again, off-again supporting work, her father perfectly cast her as calculating, imperious Maerose, the daughter of a Mafia don whose love is scorned by a hit man (Nicholson again) in his film adaptation of Richard Condon’s Mafia-satire novel Prizzi’s Honor (1985). Huston won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, making her the first person in Academy Award history to win an Oscar when a parent and a grandparent (her father and grandfather Walter Huston) had also won one.
Huston thereafter worked prolifically, including notable roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s -Gardens of Stone (1987), Barry Sonnenfeld’s film versions of the Charles Addams cartoons The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), in which she portrayed Addams matriarch Morticia, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Probably her finest performance on-screen, however, was as Lilly, the veteran, iron-willed con artist in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters (1990), for which she received another Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. A sentimental favorite is her performance as the lead in her father’s final film, an adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987) — with her many years of residence in Ireland, Huston’s Irish accent in the film is authentic.
Endowed with her father’s great height and personal boldness, and her mother’s beauty and aristocratic nose, Huston certainly cuts an imposing figure, and brings great confidence and authority to her performances. She clearly takes her craft seriously and has come into her own as a strong actress, emerging from under the shadow of her father, who passed away in 1987. Huston married the sculptor Robert Graham in 1992, and the couple live in the Los Angeles area.
